San Francisco, CA, February 22, 2012—With every passing second, the Internet grows. Most people simply don’t have the time to keep up with this ever-expanding online world, and we’re all a bit tired of clicking through hundreds of pages to find the information we need. So why not let some virtual robots do the work and tedious research?

In Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers (No Starch Press, March 2012, 392 pp., $39.95, ISBN 9781593273972), author Michael Schrenk, a noted webbot developer, teaches how to build time-saving, automated bots to mine, parse, and archive online data. The book begins with detailed, easy-to-follow instructions on how to write stealthy webbots in PHP to read email, emulate online forms, auto-authenticate, manage cookies, and handle encryption. Once readers have mastered the basics, they move on to sample projects that reinforce the material and put it in the context of the real-world. This completely updated second edition adds new information on the critical aspects of proxies, regular expressions, dealing with difficult websites, and scaling webbot projects.

According to No Starch Press founder William Pollock, "Michael Schrenk is well-known for his seminars at Defcon and sessions on data mining for journalists. He excels at making complex topics simple and clear.” Pollock continues, “With Schrenk's guidance and some basic PHP skills, you can make bots that do the drudge work for you.”

In Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, readers will learn how to build webbots that:

• Send email or SMS notifications to alert them to new information quickly
• Search different data sources and combine the results on one page, making the data easier to interpret and analyze
• Automate purchases, auction bids, and other online activities to save time

In business (and in life), we can all use more time to take care of the things that matter. Using webbots, programming-savvy readers can save time and hassle, and give themselves or their businesses that competitive advantage.